CASH ACCESS · BANKING · INEQUALITY

Banking Deserts Have Reached the City

If banking deserts are a country problem, someone forgot to tell Bondi Beach. One of Sydney’s most famous postcodes had four bank branches in 2017. Today it has none. North Melbourne, South Perth and Broadbeach tell the same story. The retreat we file under “regional” has walked quietly into the heart of our cities.

Between 2017 and 2025 Australia closed 2,489 branches, 44% of the network. The number of people with no branch in their local area has climbed to 14.0 million, more than half the country, and the fastest growth is urban, not rural. We have heard a great deal about the bush. What almost no one has counted is how far the deserts have spread into the cities. This is that count, told in five charts, with every figure computed from the prudential regulator’s own records and cross checked against the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

1. A network in retreat

THE HOOK

Since 2017 the physical banking network has shrunk on every front. Branches are down 44%, bank owned ATMs 63%. The service often sold as the safety net, , has barely moved, so nothing is scaling up to replace what is going.

Chart 1. Bank operated points of presence, Australia, indexed to 2017 = 100. Source: APRA (2025).

Text summary: branches fell 44% and ATMs 63% between 2017 and 2025, while changed by only -6%.

Indexing each service to 100 in 2017 lets us compare their trajectories honestly on one scale. Branches and ATMs have fallen off a cliff. The supposed alternative has flat lined.

2. Not just the bush

THE REFRAME

The debate treats this as a country problem. Count instead the people who no longer have a branch in their own local area, and the share has climbed from 33% to 51% of all Australians. The line for the capital cities sits above the regions and is rising just as fast. In raw numbers the cities account for the larger share of the increase, adding 4.3 million people versus 1.5 million beyond the capitals.

Chart 2. Population living in an SA2 (a local community of about 10,000 people) with zero bank branches. Denominator: ABS Estimated Resident Population. Sources: APRA (2025); ABS (2025).

Text summary: the no-branch share rose from 33% to 51%; the capital cities line is higher than, and rising as steeply as, the rest of state line.

What this does and does not mean. “No branch in your local area” means the branch has left your immediate suburb, not that you have no access at all. Many can still reach one nearby, use an ATM, or bank online. Chart 3 measures how far “nearby” has become.

3. How far is the nearest branch now?

THE GROWING DESERTS

For most Australians the nearest branch is still close: the population weighted median is just 2.2 km, up from 1.6 km in 2017. The change is concentrated in the tail. Each rung below shows how many people now live beyond 5, 10 and 20 km of any branch, and how far each group has grown since 2017.

Chart 3. Number of Australians living beyond 5, 10 and 20 km of the nearest branch, 2017 and 2025. Population weighted from each SA2’s distance; validated against the RBA figure that about 95% live within roughly 12 km. Sources: APRA (2025); ABS (2021); RBA (2024).

Text summary: the 2025 coverage curve lies below 2017 at every distance; people living more than 10 km from a branch rose from 1.9 to 2.5 million.

The branch has not just left your suburb. For a growing 2.5 million Australians it has left your district. In remote areas the nearest branch can be a round trip of hours.

4. The map of the retreat

WHERE THE DESERTS ARE

Each area below is shaded by how far its residents must travel to the nearest branch. Use the control at the top right to switch between 2017 and 2025 and watch the deserts spread, or tick “Branch locations” to overlay every branch still open in 2025 and see the gaps for yourself. The white markers pin four well known city suburbs, Bondi Beach among them, that have lost every branch they once had. Hover any area, branch or marker for the detail.

Chart 4. Average distance to the nearest bank branch by SA3 region (population weighted across its suburbs), 2017 and 2025, shading capped at 60 km. Toggle the year, or overlay the location of every 2025 branch, using the control at top right. Sources: APRA (2025); ABS (2021).

Text summary: an interactive national map; the inland interior and a growing number of outer urban and regional areas sit in the higher distance bands, and more areas darken when switched from 2017 to 2025.

Reading the map. The dark interior shows geographic reach, not where most people live. Remote regions are vast but almost empty; the great majority of Australians live in the small, pale coastal zones where a branch is still close. Switch on “Branch locations” to see how tightly branches cluster on the coasts.

5. The whole country, in motion

THE COLLAPSE, STATE BY STATE, AND WHAT NOW

Put eight years in motion. Each bubble is a state or territory, sized by population. Press play and watch every one slide down and to the left as both branches and ATMs thin out per person. No state escapes. Behind the motion are real losses: 522 suburbs and towns that had a branch in 2017 have none today.

Chart 5. Bank branches and ATMs per 100,000 people, by state and territory, 2017 to 2025. Bubble size is population; colour is state. Press play or drag the slider. Sources: APRA (2025); ABS (2025).

Text summary: an animated bubble chart in which every state and territory moves toward fewer branches and fewer ATMs per person between 2017 and 2025.

There are workable answers, including shared banking hubs as trialled in regional towns and across the UK, an expanded , and the proposed regional banking levy. Each is partial and, so far, temporary. The deserts are spreading faster than the response.

What this means

Banking is going digital by default, but not everyone can follow. Many Australians still depend on cash and in-person banking, and the people most dependent on a branch, older Australians, those on low incomes, small cash businesses and remote communities, are exactly those being left behind. None of this is a forecast. It has already happened, quietly, branch by branch.

The bottom line. From Bondi Beach to the back of Bourke, Australia has lost 44% of its bank branches in eight years. 14.0 million people, over half the country, now have none in their local area, and the fastest growth is urban, not rural. Before we treat the branch as obsolete, we should decide deliberately, not by neglect, who we are willing to strand.

Acknowledgements

Verification. The headline metric was validated by two independent methods (name matching and spatial point-in-polygon, agreeing to within 0.1%), against APRA’s published branch counts, and against the RBA’s published distance figures.

Tools and design. Maps use Leaflet; charts use Plotly; analysis was done in R with sf and dplyr. A short text summary accompanies each chart for screen-reader access. Colour follows The Conversation brand palette (Punch #D8352A, Blue Violet #505AAF, Jacksons Purple #293299), with colour-blind-safe sequential scales and direct labelling rather than colour alone. Basemap by CartoDB and OpenStreetMap contributors.

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2021). Statistical Area Level 2 (SA2) digital boundary files, ASGS Edition 3 [Data set]. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/standards/australian-statistical-geography-standard-asgs

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2025). Regional population, 2024 to 2025: Population estimates by SA2 [Data set]. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/regional-population/latest-release

Australian Prudential Regulation Authority. (2025). Authorised deposit-taking institutions’ points of presence statistics, June 2017 to June 2025 [Data set]. https://www.apra.gov.au/authorised-deposit-taking-institutions-points-of-presence-statistics

OpenStreetMap contributors. (2025). Base map data [Map tiles, via CARTO Positron]. OpenStreetMap. https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright

Reserve Bank of Australia. (2024). Submission to the inquiry into bank closures in regional Australia. https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/submissions/financial-sector/inquiry-into-bank-closures-in-regional-australia/

The Treasury. (2022). Regional Banking Taskforce: Final report. Australian Government. https://treasury.gov.au/publication/p2022-260600